by Mary Balogh
“Hold still,” he said, “while I think about it.”
And he rode up alongside her until his knee dug into the side of her thigh, leaned across the gap between them, and kissed her on the lips. Jet snorted and sidled away.
It was perhaps the briefest and least satisfactory of all their kisses. But it was the one that informed Hannah very clearly indeed of what she had known for some time now, though she had avoided admitting it.
She was in love.
Which was very careless and incautious of her. And might well cause some pain at the end of the Season if she had not succeeded in falling out of love by then.
But she could not feel as sorry as she knew she ought. She felt as if eleven years of her life had somehow rolled away and left her young again and happy again—and in love again. Not in love with love this time, though, but with a real man, whom she liked and could actually love if she let herself. Totally committed, all the way through to the soul love, that was.
She would not be that foolish.
But, oh, to have a lover, and to be in love for the whole of a springtime—it made her want to leap from Clover’s back and dance in the meadow beneath the pine tree, her face and her arms lifted to the sun.
How wonderful it was to be young.
“You may smile,” he said. “That was the sorriest prize ever awarded the victor of a horse race, Duchess. Before this day is over, I am going to demand a far more satisfactory kiss than that.”
She gave him her best haughty duchess look.
“You have to catch me first, Mr. Huxtable,” she said. “But look. You can just see Land’s End from here.”
She pointed ahead and they moved off together, side by side, at a walk this time. It was visible through a gap in the trees, a solid, quite unremarkable manor that was in many ways as dear to her as Copeland.
“How did you finance Ainsley?” she asked him.
“I am not poverty stricken,” he said with a shrug. “I was left well provided for.”
“But not well enough, I would be willing to wager,” she said. “I know something of what it costs to finance such a project. Did your brother help? You said the whole thing was his idea.”
She thought he would not answer. He looked dark and brooding again for some time. And then he laughed softly.
“The truly funny thing is,” he said, “that we did it exactly as you did, Duchess. Except that you did it with Dunbarton’s knowledge and blessing, however grudgingly given. We did not consult Jon’s guardian, who would most certainly not have given his blessing. That was our uncle before he died, and then Elliott, who had a far sterner sense of duty and a far more eagle eye.”
“You say we,” she said. “But was it Jonathan’s idea or yours to sell his valuables?”
He turned his head to look steadily at her.
“The Huxtable jewels were not mine to sell, Duchess, or even to suggest selling,” he said. “They were Jon’s, and though I was not his official guardian, I felt a great responsibility toward him. He was not by any means stupid, but sometimes he saw things differently from the way other people did. Once he discovered the truth about our fa—Ah, dash it all! But I suppose you had guessed. Once he discovered the truth about someone he had loved during life and mourned after death, he lost all his joy and all his interest in food and sleep for days on end. I had never seen him like it before. And he would not speak to me about his pain. He would only swear me over and over again to secrecy. No one must know about our father. And yet the suffering he had caused must not be ignored either. And Jon was very aware that he was now Earl of Merton, that putting everything to rights was his duty. I could not persuade him otherwise, though I had felt the same way for years, quite impotently, I might add.”
“I wish I had known him,” Hannah said softly. “Jonathan, I mean.”
“And then one morning,” Constantine said, “he came bounding into my bedchamber and shook me awake—literally. He was bursting with excitement, bubbling over with it, giggling with it. He had concocted his grand idea. And nothing would satisfy him until he had found a way of making his dream a reality. I was the one chosen to do it all for him. There was no point in arguing with Jon when he made up his mind about something important to him, Duchess—and this was more important to him than anything else in his life. He was as stubborn as a—”
“Mule?” she said. “Could he have been like his elder brother by any chance?”
“Ten times worse,” he said. “The only way I could have stopped him was to run off and tell tales to my uncle behind his back. But I wanted what Jon wanted too, you see, and I was too weak to do what was undoubtedly the right thing. For years I had been sickened by what Jon had just discovered. I knew about it all my life, it seems. I watched my mother dwindle with unhappiness and the repeated loss of children, and my father debauch everything in skirts. He was not a pleasant man, Duchess. And he hated Jon, whom he called an imbecile, sometimes to his face. I beg your pardon. One ought not to say anything aloud against one’s parents. Anyway, none of the jewels I sold for Jon was part of the entailed property. But several of them had been in the family for a few generations, and all were costly and fully documented. A good case could have been made to say that Jon had no right to dispose of those pieces without the express permission of his legal guardian. And even if he had lived to his majority I daresay the powers that be would have declared him incompetent to make his own decisions unaided.”
“He was stealing from himself, then?” she said.
“He knew what he was doing,” he said. “Jon was no fool. Sometimes I believe he was the only truly wise one among us. What is more important? Those ancient jewels locked up in a safe at Warren Hall, or those people at Ainsley?”
She laughed. “You would never be able to guess my answer, would you?”
They were getting close to Land’s End. There was just a meadow to cross and then the wide lawn to one side of the house.
“You have told no one all this?” she asked. “No one but me?”
“No,” he said. “Not even the king.”
“And so everyone thinks you are a villain,” she said, “who stole from his helpless brother in order to purchase a home for himself in Gloucestershire, where he lives in the lap of luxury.”
He shrugged.
“I believe,” he said, “Elliott must have been as closemouthed as I have, except perhaps with Vanessa. If he had not, I do not suppose Stephen or his sisters would still be on speaking terms with me, would they?”
“Or trying to protect you from me,” she agreed.
He looked at her and smiled before stooping to open the gate leading from the meadow into the park. They walked their horses through, and he shut the gate behind them.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you ought to tell the Earl of Merton what you have told me. He seems to me to be a gentle, honorable soul.”
He raised one mocking eyebrow and shot her a glance.
“You believe he would forgive me?” he asked.
“I believe,” he said, “he might assure you that forgiveness is not necessary. It is Jonathan he needs to forgive rather than you, anyway, is it not?”
He nudged his horse to a slightly faster pace and moved ahead of her until she made the effort to catch up.
“That is what you fear most?” she asked. “That no one will be able to forgive your brother? Perhaps you need to give them more credit.”
He turned to look fully at her again, and his features looked very taut, his eyes very black.
“Have you told anyone about this?” he asked her, nodding toward the house. “Anyone except me?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked. “Why did you not invite all your guests to come here this afternoon?”
“I have a reputation to protect, Constantine,” she said.
“Precisely,” he told her. “I do too. Devil and duchess. We deserve each other.”
In the eyes of the world? Or … in truth?
“If we were not so close to the house,” he said, “I might begin on all the reasons you ought to go back home, Duchess. To Markle, that is.”
She leaned forward to pat Clover’s neck as they stopped outside the stables and a groom hurried out to assist them.
“Point taken,” she said.
WATCHING HANNAH over the next hour and a half, Constantine tried to make the connection with the Duchess of Dunbarton as he had always known her, and as he had encountered her earlier in the spring in Hyde Park, at the Merriwether ball, at the Heaton concert, at the Fonteyn garden party. It was rather disorienting to discover that he could not do it. He could not see her as the same person.
It was not just that she wore a faded blue, almost shabby, riding habit. Or that her hair was dressed simply and was even slightly untidy after she removed her hat inside the house. It was not even that she donned a large white apron, which had been hanging on the back of the door in the manager’s office. It really had nothing to do with her outer appearance.
It had everything to do with the woman inside the outer shell, the woman he had not seen at all until after they became lovers and had seen only in snatched glimpses since then. At Land’s End that woman stood fully revealed, a butterfly free of its cocoon and fluttering about, beautiful, energetic, sparkling with joy and bringing that joy to all around her.
He was, quite simply, dazzled.
He was also quite alarmingly in love.
It was not upon him that her beauty and energy and joy were focused, though she did smile at him every time she looked his way and included him in the aura of her magnetic charm.
She presented him to Mrs. Broome, the manager, a lady of middle years and pleasant appearance and soft-spoken manner, and together they began a tour of the home. But it did not last for very long. An elderly man who was sitting in the residents’ drawing room caught hold of the duchess’s arm—he called her “Miss Hannah,” as they all did—and proceeded to tell her at great length about the latest exploits of his grandchildren. They were a figment of his imagination, Mrs. Broome explained as she walked onward with Constantine, leaving the duchess behind, but they brought him pleasure nonetheless and he loved to have someone willing to listen to his stories. And then two elderly ladies, who were sitting side by side in a wide upper hallway, wanted to know after they had been introduced to him if Mr. Huxtable had come with Miss Hannah—they had heard she was here. When he admitted that he had, they wanted to know if he was going to marry her. She deserved someone young and devilishly handsome like him, they both decided, and they cackled with glee when he grinned and winked at them and told them they would have to ask her that. Mrs. Broome meanwhile had been called away to deal with some emergency.
Constantine wandered alone after that, keeping mainly to the lower floor, where it seemed that most of the rooms were open for the communal use of the residents, though Mrs. Broome had explained that all had rooms of their own, where they could be private and no one could enter without first knocking and being given permission to enter. It was one of the few rules of the house.
“It is a home,” she had added. “It is not an institution, Mr. Huxtable. There are very few rules, and all have to be first suggested and then voted upon by the tenants themselves. It may sound like a recipe for chaos, and I was a little dubious when her grace insisted upon it, I must confess, but for some reason it works like a charm. People, I suppose, are less likely to break rules that have been imposed by themselves and not by some autocratic outsider.”
He stopped several times to speak to elderly people as he moved about and to a few of the employees who cared for their needs.
Hannah was still listening to the elderly gentleman with the imaginary grandchildren when he went downstairs. She was holding his hand and giving him her full, bright-eyed attention. The next time Constantine saw her, she was in the plant-filled conservatory, patiently feeding an old woman who was staring blankly ahead of her, and this time she was doing the talking, smiling and animated just as if the woman could understand and respond. And who knew? Perhaps she could understand. A little later Constantine saw Hannah on the terrace outside the conservatory, a thin old man leaning on her arm as they walked. She had her head turned toward him and was laughing. He stopped walking to look up at her, and he was laughing too.
The older one got, Constantine thought, the easier it was to believe that all lives followed their own very definite pattern, that all things happened for a reason. Not fate exactly. That took away free will and made nonsense of life. But some unseen force that drew each person toward the lesson that needed to be learned, the life that needed to be lived, the fulfillment that needed to be achieved. And perhaps ultimate happiness. The disasters of life in retrospect were often its greatest blessings.
Hannah’s heart had been broken when she was nineteen in a particularly cruel manner. She had simultaneously lost the man she loved and the future she had planned with him and her trust in her only sister. And her father had let her down, even if he had been caught in a nasty situation. And then she had married a man old enough to be her grandfather, and he had lived for ten years, until her youth had gone.
But in the process of all that, she had not only learned how to guard herself against those who would exploit or resent her beauty without ever seeing her, how to control her life rather than be at the mercy of those who would do it for her and then blame her for being so beautiful and so vulnerable. She had also discovered what was perhaps the true purpose of her life—a deep love of those weaker than herself, specifically the elderly. And that discovery had released that part of herself that might forever have remained submerged beneath her beauty and its effect upon those around her if Young had married her. It was a self, Constantine was willing to wager, that was far more warm and vibrant than the person she had been when she was betrothed to Sir Colin Young.
The past eleven years of her life had followed a definite pattern, something she could never have predicted or planned twelve years ago. Those years had not been an interval in her life, a lost youth. They had been integral to it, a well-spent youth.
It had been no coincidence that she had discovered the truth about her betrothed and her sister at that particular wedding, or that Dunbarton had attended it and escaped to the very room where she had unburdened herself to her father. It had been cosmic theater in progress. Except that only the scene had been set by the master producer. The script had not been written.
Even now, of course, she was fearful. She hid herself behind the Siren’s mask of the Duchess of Dunbarton. But that too was part of the pattern. She was still fragile. Like a person trapped in a burning building and clinging to the sill of an upper floor, she was afraid to take the final drop to the safety of the blanket being held below. She needed to be given time to do it in her own way, when she was ready.
But who was he to judge?
Besides, it would be a pity if the Duchess of Dunbarton were to disappear entirely. She was a magnificent, fascinating creature.
She was coming inside with the elderly man, Constantine could see, and she smiled warmly at him when she saw him standing there.
“Are you going to sit in the conservatory and enjoy the sunshine, Mr. Ward?” she asked.
“I am going up to my room to rest for a while,” he said. “You have exhausted me, Miss Hannah. I shall sleep and dream of you and of being a young man again like this one here.”
“Have you met Mr. Huxtable?” she asked. “He came here with me today. He is my friend.”
“Sir.” Constantine inclined his head. “May I help you to your room?”
“I can get there on my own, young man,” Ward said, “if you will hand me the cane propped against that chair. I thank you for your kindness, but I like to do things for myself while I can. I could have walked outside with my cane, but I was not going to refuse an offer to walk arm in arm with a lady instead, now, was I? And me a mere dock worker all my life.�
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He chuckled and Constantine smiled.
“We will leave now,” the duchess said as the old man walked slowly away. “I hope the time has not been tedious for you.”
“It has not,” Constantine assured her.
Ten minutes later they were on horseback again and on their way back to Copeland. They did not speak until he had let them into the meadow beyond the lawn and shut the gate behind them and ridden half across the meadow.
“I think, Duchess,” he said, “that house is filled with happy people.”
She turned her head to smile at him.
“Mrs. Broome is a perfect manager,” she said. “And she has a wonderful staff.”
And she was happy when she was at that house, he thought. It was her marriage to the elderly duke that had brought her there.
The pattern of life.
And the pattern of Jon’s life had led to Ainsley, though he had not lived to see it.
And his own? Had he been born two days early—two days before his parents married—so that he would be illegitimate and unable to inherit the title himself? Had he found a better, more meaningful purpose for his life than he would have found as Earl of Merton? Was he better off, happier, than he would otherwise have been?
It was a dizzying thought.
Perhaps the circumstances of his birth had not blighted the whole of his life after all. Perhaps his secret affair with Jon’s dream was what his life was meant to bring him.
Perhaps he had benefited as much from Ainsley as the people who had passed through it.
“You are brooding,” she said.
“Not at all,” he assured her. “It is just my Mediterranean looks.”
“Which of course are quite splendid,” she said, sounding more like the old duchess. “No man without them could brood half as well.”
He laughed.
They rode onward in companionable silence until they came close to Copeland.
“I’ll take you back a different way,” she said. “There is something I want you to see.”
“Another cause?” he asked.
